Mixpanel to Google Data Studio

This page provides you with instructions on how to extract data from Mixpanel and analyze it in Google Data Studio. (If the mechanics of extracting data from Mixpanel seem too complex or difficult to maintain, check out Stitch, which can do all the heavy lifting for you in just a few clicks.)

What is Mixpanel?

Mixpanel is an advanced analytics platform for event-based data that collects data about how users interact with mobile and web applications. Mixpanel users can build robust funnel analysis using real-time data.

Getting data out of Mixpanel

You can use the Mixpanel Export API to extract data about events and people from Mixpanel’s servers. Using the processes in the API documentation, you should be able to claim all the datasets you need.

Sample Mixpanel data

The API returns JSON-formatted data. Here's an example of the kind of response you might see when querying the event data.

Keeping Mixpanel data up to date

At this point you've coded up a script or written a program to get the data you want and successfully moved it into your data warehouse. But how will you load new or updated data? It's not a good idea to replicate all of your data each time you have updated records. That process would be painfully slow and resource-intensive.

Instead, identify key fields that your script can use to bookmark its progression through the data and use to pick up where it left off as it looks for updated data. Auto-incrementing fields such as updated_at or created_at work best for this. When you've built in this functionality, you can set up your script as a cron job or continuous loop to get new data as it appears in Mixpanel.

And remember, as with any code, once you write it, you have to maintain it. If Mixpanel modifies its API, or the API sends a field with a datatype your code doesn't recognize, you may have to modify the script. If your users want slightly different information, you definitely will have to.

Easier yet, however, is using a solution that does all that work for you. Products like Stitch were built to move data from Mixpanel to Google Data Studio automatically. With just a few clicks, Stitch starts extracting your Mixpanel data via the API, structuring it in a way that's optimized for analysis, and inserting that data into a data warehouse that can be easily accessed and analyzed by Google Data Studio.